Academic literature on the topic 'Gentrification – pennsylvania – philadelphia'

One of the more detrimental effects of gentrification is the potential for a decreased sense of neighbourhood community. Systematic analysis of the effect of gentrification on communities has been limited. This study investigated how an individual’s sense of connection to neighbourhood community, as measured by trust, belongingness and sense of cooperation, was influenced by their residence in a gentrifying neighbourhood. We utilised hierarchical linear models with individual data from the 2014/2015 Public Health Management Corporation’s Southeastern Pennsylvania Household Health Survey and neighbourhood data from the 2000 Decennial Census and 2010–2014 American Community Survey. We find that gentrification overall has a negative relation with neighbourhood community, but this relationship varied by the racial/ethnic turnover underlying the changes taking place in these neighbourhoods. Specifically, we find that gentrification marked by increases in Whites and decreases in non-Whites had no measurable relation with neighbourhood community; that gentrification marked by increases in non-Whites alone had a positive effect on neighbourhood community for Black and Hispanic residents; and that gentrifying neighbourhoods which experienced an increase in both Whites and non-Whites had a negative overall relation with neighbourhood community.

Cities worldwide are grappling with complex urban environmental injustices. While environmental justice as a concept has gained prominence in both academia and policy, operationalizing and implementing environmental justice principles and norms remains underexplored. Notably, less attention has been given to centering the perspectives and experiences of community-based actors operating at the grassroots level, who can inform and strengthen urban environmental justice practice. Through ethnographic, participant-as-observer methods, interviews, and geovisualizations, this study explores the perspectives, experiences, knowledge, and practices of community-based urban forest stewards in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (United States) who are invested in addressing environmental injustices through urban tree-planting and stewardship. Interviewees were asked how they were addressing issues of distribution, procedure, and recognition in urban forest planning and practice, as well as the socio-political and institutional factors that have influenced their perspectives and practices. Particular attention is given to how urban forest stewards implement recognitional justice principles. Findings from this study exposed several complex socio-political challenges affecting steward engagement in community-led tree initiatives and the broader pursuit of environmental justice, including discriminatory urban planning practices, gentrification concerns, underrepresentation of Black and Latinx voices in decision-making, volunteer-based tree-planting models, and tree life cycle costs. Nevertheless, urban forest stewards remain dedicated to collective community-building to address environmental injustices and stress the importance of recognizing, listening to, dialoguing with, and validating the perspectives and experiences of their neighbors as essential to their process.

This article engages with affect theory and Black feminist interrogations of the human to examine the conflicting feelings evoked by the gentrification process. Black feminist theorists have long demonstrated how histories linger, shape, and make meaning in the present. Affect theory offers further insight into this process by illustrating how we imbue people, places, and things with meaning. This article links these perspectives to address how associations such as economic development/life, Blackness/death, and the uninhabitable/nonhuman shape public sentiments on gentrification and space more broadly. This discussion centers on two urban development projects in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a city that is, like many American cities, racially segregated. This analysis attends to how antiblackness circulates to imbue space and bodies with racialized meaning and resonance. I advance that while this circulation of affects is devastatingly powerful, antiblackness does not circulate uncontested or capture all elements of Black life and Black place-making.

As housing costs continue to increase across many cities in North America and Europe, local governments face pressure to understand how housing’s rising cost is changing neighbourhoods and to ensure that everyone can access a home they can afford. To confront displacement concerns, cities are adapting models developed within academia to identify neighbourhoods that may be susceptible to gentrification and displacement. We compare four gentrification and displacement risk models developed by and for the US cities of Seattle, Washington; Los Angeles, California; Portland, Oregon; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and apply all four methodologies to one city, Boston. We identify the geographic areas of agreement and disagreement among the methods. The comparison reveals striking differences between the models, both in inputs and outputs. Of the 18 variables considered among the four models, only two variables appear in all four models. In the resulting maps, the four methods identified between 25 and 119 of the 180 Boston census tracts as at risk of gentrification and displacement, or as currently gentrifying. There are only seven tracts that all four models agreed were either gentrifying or at risk of gentrification and displacement. The findings indicate a need for cities to consider critically the assumptions of the models that are included in urban policy documents, as indicators and thresholds have major impacts on how neighbourhoods in the liminal space of gentrification and displacement are characterised. This novel comparison of United States local government analyses of gentrification provides insight as modelling moves from theory to practice.